The strongest earthquake to hit Mexico in a century has left at least 61 people dead, toppling houses, damaging hospitals and government offices, and sparking mass evacuations.
The magnitude 8.1 quake struck off the country’s southern Pacific coast, 100 miles (165km) west of the state of Chiapas just before midnight on Thursday local time.
All the deaths were in three neighbouring states clustered round the epicentre. In Oaxaca, 45 people died and in Tabasco three people lost their lives, the head of Mexico’s civil protection agency, Luis Felipe Puentes, said.
Chiapas’s governor, Manuel Velasco, said 12 had died in Chiapas, bringing the total to 61.
Velasco called on people living near the coast to leave their houses as a protective measure.
“There is damage to hospitals that have lost energy,” he said. “Homes, schools and hospitals have been damaged.”
The Tabasco governor, Arturo Núñez, said two dead in his state were children. One died after a wall collapsed and the other, a baby, died in a children’s hospital after a power cut stopped electricity to its ventilator.
On Friday morning, Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, tweeted: “Sadly, there are reports that people have died. My deepest condolences to their families.”
The president said at least a million people had been left without electricity after the quake, but power had since been restored to 800,000 of them. He urged people to be vigilant and to check gas supplies as well as walls and columns.
The US Geological Survey recorded at least 20 aftershocks of magnitude 4.0 or greater within about five hours after the main shake, and the president warned that a major aftershock as large as magnitude 7.2 could occur.
In a series of tweets, Peña Nieto said schools would be closed for the day in Mexico City, the state of Mexico, Chiapas, Hidalgo, Veracruz, Guerrero, Tabasco, Oaxaca, Puebla and Tlaxcala. He said the suspension of classes would allow experts to determine the damage to schools.
The Pacific tsunami warning centre said waves as high as three metres could strike the coast but the president sought to allay fears about huge waves rushing towards the coastline, telling the Televisa TV network: “The tsunami risk on the Chiapas coast does not represent a major risk. It’s not very big, it’s not a major worry.”
Rodrigo Soberanes, who lives near San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, told Associated Press his house had “moved like chewing gum” during the quake.
Reports suggested that a hotel in the south of the country was among the buildings that suffered severe damage, and rescuers were searching for trapped people.
In Mexico City, windows were broken at the airport and power went out in several neighbourhoods.
People in the capital, one of the world’s largest cities, ran out into the streets in their pyjamas after the quake struck, a Reuters witness said. Helicopters hovered overhead a few minutes later, apparently looking for damage to buildings.
Liliana Villa, 35, who had fled her apartment, said: “It felt horrible, and I thought ‘this is going to fall’.”
Luis Carlos Briceño, a 31-year-old architect visiting Mexico City, said: “I had never been anywhere where the earth moved so much. At first I laughed, but when the lights went out I didn’t know what to do. I nearly fell over.”
A video quickly went viral showing the Ángel de la Independencia monument swaying as it was bathed in green light.
Así se vivió el sismo de esta noche en el Ángel de la Independencia pic.twitter.com/94e6wgjy5W
— BuzzFeed News México (@BuzzFeedNewsMex) September 8, 2017
The tremor appears to have been stronger than the magnitude 8.0 earthquake in 1985 that levelled large portions of the capital, killing 5,000 people and destroying 10,000 houses.
Much of Mexico City was built on the soft soil of a former lakebed, leaving it vulnerable to earthquakes. Building codes have been tightened since 1985, and earthquake drills for apartment dwellers and officer workers have become common in recent years.
Public officials were quick to provide updates on damage and give instructions, unlike in 1985 when the country’s politicians went missing in action and residents, many left homeless, fended for themselves and teamed up to pull people out of piles of rubble.
The tsunami warning centre recorded initial waves a metre over tide level off the city of Salina Cruz. It predicted waves of between 30cm and a metre for the Cook Islands, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guatemala and Kiribati.
Guatemala’s president, Jimmy Morales, said he had reports of an unconfirmed death near the border with Mexico, in San Marcos state. “We have reports of some damage and the death of one person, even though we still don’t have details,” he said.
Lucy Jones, a seismologist in California who works with the US Geological Survey, said such a quake was to be expected. “Off the west coast of Mexico is what’s called the subduction zone: the Pacific plate is moving under the Mexican peninsula,” she said.
The Mexican seismological authority said the quake was 19km deep and triggered a series of magnitude 6 aftershocks.
“Chiapas is historically a very seismic state due to the interaction of five tectonic plates,” it said in a report on the earthquake. The state has suffered three tremors above magnitude 7 since 1970, including one on 7 November 2012 that measured 7.3.
